Greats Gatsby essays

Greats Gatsby essays A dream is defined in the Webster's New World Dictionary as: a fanciful vision of the conscious mind; a fond hope or aspiration; anything so lovely, transitory, etc. as to seem dreamlike. In the beginning pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story gives us a glimpse into Gatsby's idealistic dream which is later disintegrated. "No- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elation's of men." Gatsby is revealed to us slowly and skillfully, and with a keen tenderness which in the end makes his tragedy Jay Gatsby is a crook, a bootlegger who has involved himself with swindlers like Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. He has committed crimes in order to buy the house he feels he needs to win the woman he loves. In chapter five Nick says, "...and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes." Everything in Gatsby's house is the zenith of his dreams, and when Daisy enters Gatsby's house the material things seem to lose their life. Daisy represents a dreamlike, heavenly presence which all that he has is devoted to. Yes, we should consider Jay Gatsby as tragic figure because of belief that he can restore the past and live happily, but his distorted faith is so intense that he blindly unaware of realism that his dream lacks. Gatsby has accumulated his money by dealings with gangsters, yet he remains an innocent figure, he is extravagant. Gatsby is not interested in power for its own sake or in money or prestige. What he wants is his dream, and that dream is embodied in Daisy. Ironically, Daisy Buchanan, is a much more realistic, hard- headed character. She understands money and what it ...